Catching the Dream, Weaving the Story

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Sunday, April 24, 2016

Recently a friend of ours started selling Pampered Chef cookware. John is the cook in our family, but even I fell in love with this cookware. It makes cooking a meal easier and quicker -- essential for us these days.

So we decided to share some recipes. To make it fun, since we are writers after all, we're using the metaphor of Who-Done-It. This week's recipe is Kernel Mustard's Chicken.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

A lot of people are sick of snow. I get it. Last year I was sick of snow by this time too. If I lived on the East Coast, I would definitely be sick of snow. However, here in Missouri, I was worried that we'd miss out on snow this winter.

Fortunately, in mid-February the snow started coming down, and it hasn't really let up much since. Here's a picture of me sledding after the second snowstorm. That snow was a wet snow. It packed well, but the sledding wasn't great.

The snow we got yesterday was GREAT for sledding. It started with about 2 hours of sleet. Then a slow powder fell all day long. This morning we had a nice sheet of ice and then powder on top of it. It won't last long because the sun is shining bright, so we got our sleds and took to the hillside.

John took an accidental selfie when he was getting ready to film me. I didn't tell him I had my phone in selfie mode because Mickey was taking selfies last night. There's Mickey's selfie on the left. He was definitely being tricky, hogging the space heater.

See the face wrap John's wearing. We call it his Jacob Marley scarf. It's not really holding his jaw on, but it does keep the cold wind out. And yes, although the sun was shining, the wind bit.

So here's my first run -- it's actually my second run. I had tried the hill about an hour before this and decided it was best to eat a little something before so much exertion. That run was not filmed.

This run was exhilarating. The ice under the powder provided almost no resistance. Of course, no resistance means no control. John took a run and found that out for himself.

And here's my last run. This time I had to lean really far to the left to try to keep the sled from veering off into the trees. At the end of the run, I lost control. You can't see it, but I had to wipe out to keep from plummeting into a tree.

We decided to call it quits. Going down the icy hill is one thing. Walking up it is a whole different story.

But we are thankful for some fast snow to end our winter.

Sledding is something we like to do every year. Our sledding adventures inspired one of my short stories, The Big Hill. Warning though -- the story might make you cry.